Dear Sticky Wicket,
Can we do away with “hyphens” for everyone and settle for calling ourselves Americans? Maybe emphasizing the sameness of all of us instead of the differences would go a long way to eliminating racial divides.
~Joyce Campbell, Whittier, CA
Dear Joyce,
Celebrating our “sameness” would seem ideal and plausible in a perfect society — one in which cultural differences are points of celebration, rather than exclusion. Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect society with a checkered past.
Using the federal laws enacted in the sixties and seventies to open the doors of opportunity for the nation’s minority citizenry, the demand for consistent statistical models for tracking progress among minority groups increased.
In 1974, an Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions created a set of racial classifications for education data. Their recommendations—American-Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, black, Hispanic and white—were the basis of the Office of Management and Budget’s Directive 15.
Directive 15, adopted May 12, 1977, provides standard classifications for collecting and distributing racial and ethnic data in Federal program administrative reporting.
Since then, U.S. race relations evolved significantly with persons of color making significant gains in politics, education, employment, and other areas of public and private advancement. Our society is more diverse, and since it was first calculated in 2000, America’s mixed-race population increased by 25 percent.
Although these advancements are significant, exclusion and discrimination still exist. Greenpoint Mortgage Funding Inc., paid $1 million to the New York Attorney General’s office after being accused of charging black and Latino borrowers more than white customers for mortgage loans.
A report released by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies revealed that minority groups are more likely to receive subprime loans, compared to their white counterparts. After incorporating lending standards — credit scores and income — 30 percent of all subprime mortgages went to blacks, compared to 17 percent for whites. The results are similar for other ethnic groups. Without the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires lending institutions to publicly disclose lending data, these issues may have never been discovered.
In theory, celebrating “our sameness” seems reasonable especially in an increasingly diverse society such as ours. But unfortunately, Joyce, we live in a society that discriminates on the basis of difference.
“In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently,” says Former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.